Eastbourne artist promises a candy-coloured trip down memory lane

Helen Barnard is the latest artist to exhibit at the New Art Gallery in Eastbourne with her Seaside Memories show. Her highly pigmented and colourful canvases take a candy-coloured trip down memory lane, revisiting childhood seaside holidays, she promises.

Helen, who has exhibited throughout London and the south-east, creates evocative, pared-down landscapes in oils, mixed media and metal leaf. The recent lockdowns prompted her to re-explore British seaside holidays from her childhood – the excitement of long days by the sea and the promise of good weather always seeming a stretch too far. These memories were the inspiration for Helen to take another look at some of her favourite seaside haunts, including Seven Sisters, Seaford Beach and Cuckmere Haven. The stylishly sparse landscapes and highly decorative and delicate floral still lives are rendered in a candy palette of baby pinks, peppermints and sherbet lemons, contrasted with comforting teals and soft, nostalgic greys.

Helen said: “My creative theme is usually always All things bright and beautiful but the experience of lockdown heightened this feeling. I felt the need for lots of colour and shine to offset everything else that was happening.

"This exhibition features many local landscapes seen through a lens of childlike sensibility and awareness of colour and shine (my memories of the joy of pick ‘n; pick have never left me), and allowed me to revisit all those favourite spots from my childhood, all painted in retrospective palette of candy colours.”

The exhibition runs Saturday, November 5 to Sunday, November 27.

Also coming up in Eastbourne, Lament For Lorca plays the Grove Theatre on Saturday, November 19 at 2pm and 7.30pm.

Spokesman Graham Benge said: “The works of the legendary Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca remain popular long after his brutal murder in 1936 by a Fascist gang in the opening weeks of a vicious civil war that was to tear Spain asunder and begin a 40-year dictatorship. Federico Garcia Lorca distilled into his works the very essence of Andalucia, searing heat, riotous colours, joys, passions, comedy and tragedy. Cancion Gitana portray his extraordinary life and violent death and close friendships with Bunuel, Dali and Picasso.”